Study on the System Efficiency of the Capacitive Pulsed-Power Supply

Electromagnetic railgun systems based on capacitive pulsed-power supply (CPPS) have obtained widespread applications because of its obvious advantages over the inductive ones on mature technology, operational reliability, and feasible financial condition. However, the existing CPPS-based electromagnetic railgun system works with low efficiency. In this paper, systematical studies on the CPPS in the synchronously triggered electromagnetic railgun system with constant volume and in the time-delay-triggered electromagnetic railgun system with automatic segmentation are proposed, respectively. In the synchronously triggered electromagnetic railgun system, all pulse-forming units (PFUs) are supposed to be triggered synchronously and the load is simplified as a resistor first. Then, the system performance criteria, i.e., the launch velocity of the armature vend and the system efficiency η, are expressed as the function of four independent system variables: 1) the capacitance of each PFU C; 2) the precharged voltage U_C of capacitors; 3) the rail length l; and 4) the armature mass m. The relationship between η (or v_end) and any two independent variables can be found under the environment of MATLAB R2012a by fixing the other two parameters. The results are then verified under the environment of Simplorer 8. These figures can be used to instruct the design of the pulsed-power supply for a designated load or the railgun for a designated source. In the time-delay-triggered electromagnetic railgun system, the principle of automatic segmentation is proposed. According to the segmentation principle, the simulation results under the environment of Simplorer 8 are given for comparison. The paper can provide a theoretical foundation for the future designs to get higher system efficiency.